Following the principle that the roof doesn’t leak when the sun shines, you can probably put off procrastination until the future.

This could be the takeaway to the city’s over-budget, long-delayed rail project, because actually paying for running and repairing the train is at least eight years away.

According to the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation, the current estimate is that perhaps the train would run to Aloha Stadium by late 2020. It would then be finished by 2025, according to the official forecast.

Then paying for the train becomes not a one-time event, it is forever.

It becomes our baby,
100 percent. If it breaks, we pay to fix it. If we want people to run it, we pay the salaries.

City Councilwoman Ann Kobayashi, the former budget committee chairwoman, said the current estimate is that rail’s operating expenses will be $120 million a year. Other estimates are a tad lower, but as Kobayashi pointed out, this is in the range of 9 percent of the city budget.

“So somehow we have to find 9 percent more city revenue,” Kobayashi said in an interview.

Earlier Mayor Kirk Caldwell told the Legislature he is proposing raising the city’s vehicle-weight tax, the gas tax and parking fees to the tune of $65 million a year. Presumably that money could then go for
operations and maintenance, although without an airtight seal around the new money, it is more likely that the city would use that money for salary increases, homeless projects, needed contributions to health and retirement benefits and all the rest of the items that gobble up the budget.

“We have park maintenance; our roads are in terrible shape,” said Kobayashi. “How are we going to do that and add to operating expenses, too? We are going to be stuck.”

Fellow Council members also were not overjoyed to hear that tough, consumer-
oriented tax increases were going to pay for the train.

“Just to show them that we’re serious, we have to show revenue enhancement proposals,” Council Budget Chairman Joey Manahan said about Caldwell’s plan to appease the state Legislature.

So the city is building a train it can neither afford to build nor operate.

There is a way out of this problem. Just ignore it.

Perhaps not on as extravagant a level as rail, but the Hawaii model is to just blink and maybe it will go away.

The first example is the Waikiki Natatorium, which was a crumbling and polluted swimming pool 38 years ago when the city shut it down.

Since then, it has been studied and prayed over. Schemes have come and gone. Honolulu has had six mayors since 1979 and every one had a plan. Another proposal came up this year. But the only thing certain is that 38 years later, it is a crumbling and polluted eyesore.

Another example of our ability to ignore and neglect is also on the waterfront: the nearly 140-year-old, three-masted Falls of Clyde, which along with Hokule‘a, is Honolulu’s most tangible link to its seafaring past.

For the last 50 years it has been in Honolulu, most recently as an interesting maritime museum. Now it is a derelict and condemned as a navigation hazard by the state Department of Transportation, which wants it gone.

The Friends of Falls of Clyde are trying to work out a plan to ship it back to its original homeport in Scotland before the state has it scuttled.